FreeBSD on EC2 maybe real now ?

[Zladivliba Voskuy]

Thanks a lot for your post. This is really usefull for all of us how are dreaming to put FreeBSD on EC2. I'll get it a try this weekend to see if I can do something. Ok, let's keep us posted through this list ! 
Great !

Z.


> Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2010 16:00:02 -0700
> Subject: Re: FreeBSD on EC2 maybe real now ?
> From: john.c.prather at gmail.com
> To: nospampam at hotmail.fr
> CC: freebsd-xen at freebsd.org
> 
> I'm not familiar with EC2 myself yet, but I did play with FreeBSD
> booted out of pvgrub on linode's xen system.
> 
> It was something of a pain, and required their finnix linux setup
> (some rescue linux system that they offer which did not consume my own
> paid-for disk volumes) to write the OS disk image to a volume, create
> the /boot fs and put the kernel into it, etc.  (linode uses paravirt
> which resulted in unstable FreeBSD, so I never did get a Linode
> FreeBSD system setup that was acceptable)
> 
> Depending on the ability to run one of their own provided systems on a
> very tiny portion of available volume space in order to put the
> FreeBSD pieces into place, it might be similar.
> 
> I used this as my guide:
> 
> http://www.linode.com/wiki/index.php/NetBSD_howto
> 
> Which I had to make heavy modifications to because FreeBSD != NetBSD
> (for instance, netbsd apparently compiles under linux)
> 
> Using my experience applying that info to FreeBSD, I threw together
> some documentation about all the failures I had getting FreeBSD to be
> stable on paravirt.
> 
> http://wiki.interwebfun.org/index.php?title=FreeBSD_XEN_Guests
> 
> I imagine one of the more relevant portions of this page would be
> "Building XEN Kernels" and "Creating Disk Image".
> 
> The former shows how I built XEN kernels on my local desktop for this.
>  The latter details how I created the disk image for the OS volume.
> Apparently I did not detail how I setup the boot fs with the kernel
> image(s), so refer to the NetBSD_howto page for copying the kernels
> over and booting them.
> 
> Keep in mind that these are suggestions for a starting point when
> trying to setup FreeBSD on a remote system with pvgrub, and almost
> everything will need to be considered and adjusted for amazon's EC2
> environment.   I had FreeBSD 7.2 with xen patches happily booting from
> pvgrub on Linode's xen system, but 7.3, 8.0, 9.0 were all terribly
> unstable, and most would not even boot in SMP.   I'm under the
> impression that HVM is far more reliable than ParaVirt for FreeBSD,
> however I don't know what EC2 provides.
> 
> I will probably play around with this a bit myself in the coming
> weeks.  If i run into some success, I will post an update with more
> useful information.
> 
> 
> -john
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 6:47 AM, Zladivliba Voskuy <nospampam at hotmail.fr> wrote:
> >
> > Hey guys !
> >
> > It seems there's a little hope to make progress with FreeBSD on EC2, as Amazon posted this announcement : http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2010/07/use-your-own-kernel-with-amazon-ec2.html
> >
> > I couldn't read the documentation about how to do this but they say "You could (if you are sufficiently adept) use this facility to launch an operating system that we don't support directly (e.g. FreeBSD). If you manage to do this, please feel free to let me know".
> >
> > Does anyone knows how to do this actually ? Or is this really possible ?
> >
> > I've been waiting for an FreeBSD ec2 image for years now ! I know there's a lot of persons waiting also around so if anyone knows how to make this happen, please post somehting !!!!
> >
> > Thanks !
> > Z.
> >
> >
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